Officials Warned of Obamacare Site Crash in July

E-mails released today

 Nearly three months before the rocky Oct. 1 launch of HealthCare.gov, senior managers in charge of creating the online exchanges repeatedly warned of problems with the site -- with one voicing concern the team might "crash the plane at take-off."

The warnings were included in internal emails that were released Friday by Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Two series of internal emails in July between officials at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, including HealthCare.gov project manager Henry Chao, detailed struggles with the creation, development and implementation of the website.

Problems also included staff shortages and significant issues with the software, according to the documents.

"I just need to feel more confident they are not going to crash the plane at take-off," Chao wrote in a July 16 email, which was sent ahead of a meeting with then-prime contractor CGI Federal. Chao described the agency's low confidence level on everything from repeated requests for deadline extensions to poor quality assurance with the software.

Comments

[Rrabbit]

The people in charge have no clue how to plan and run such a project. They would have needed to have the whole software stack fully implemented and up and running in March 2013 at the latest, to have enough time to do load testing, testing of the integration of the whole software stack, and fix just the most critical problems that become evident only once the components provided by different suppliers are integrated.

Instead, they were still implementing basic functionality in July.